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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: The Loudspeaker (Troels Gravesen project); Finally!
Post Subject: Personal relationship to gearPosted by rowuk on: 2/20/2026
In my view, the loudspeaker is a type of musical instrument that can be manipulated in any number of ways, albeit with playback, primarily statically. Just like the acclimation period with a musical instrument, we become accustomed to various parameters as well as the "feedback" to our senses. For those taking their playback (or acclimation to a musical instrument) seriously, there is a period of refinement during which there are things good and bad obvious to our perception. We react with our experience to solve these challenges, or learn new skills to deal with them. Hopefully at one stage, we reach a point where there are few triggers for disturbances in the presentation. At this point, we become "confident" in the overall response and turn the playback on with different motivation. At this point, we can hear THROUGH the playback and our focus is no longer the presentation, rather the performance. Paul, I believe that this is what happened with "the Loudspeakers".
In my view, the next step (I am not assuming that anyone here is not already well along in this part of the journey) is the acclimation to the "performances" where we learn through experience to become confident in the readings by specific artists or ensembles. This stage borrows tools from listening to live performances and we in fact, then select the performances to be played back in a more purposeful way. When our musically interpretive chops are up to speed, we start to ask questions about why this is important, what it does to and with us as well as how and why we react internally the way we do and in my view more importantly, how we react externally - do we have things to share, things to learn outside of our comfort zone.
In my 60 years of performance and >55 years of audio, I have had the great fortune of having mentors during critical and non critical periods and learning the lesson that that good fortune certainly showed me how small I really am in the overall scope of things BUT that I can still make an important difference by freely sharing those skills learned. The unfortunate reality is that there is a lot of preparation required to practice those skills. How can one communicate a transcendental moment to someone who does not practice any type of process hygiene?Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site